2023
Pure Plains
A streetwear brand I built, ran for two years, and shut down.
What
A D2C streetwear brand built for the Indian market. Website-only, no marketplaces. Handled everything from brand identity, product sourcing, influencer partnerships, Meta ads, logistics, and order operations.
Why
Wanted to build something physical and learn what actually goes into getting a product from a vendor to a customer's door. Apparel seemed like the right place to start. It wasn't easy, but it taught me more about operations and unit economics than anything else I've done.
Work
Sourced products across multiple vendors most were unreliable on deadlines and worse on credit terms. Built influencer partnerships for organic reach. Ran Meta ads for sales volume. Built a WhatsApp automation layer to handle COD confirmations, address verification, and RTO reduction. Introduced partial payment to shift COD orders to prepaid, and ran COD-to-prepaid discount nudges that meaningfully improved cash flow. Handled returns, delivery failures, and logistics disputes manually before automating parts of it.
Learned
Shipping eats your margin before you even see the revenue. In India, COD is unavoidable but brutal high RTO rates, cash flow delays, and fraud risk compound quickly. The vendor ecosystem is fragmented and unreliable; finding someone who meets deadlines and offers reasonable credit terms is genuinely hard. Meta ads work for volume but not for margin, you can buy customers, you just can't always make money on them. The real skill in D2C isn't the brand or the ads, it's the operations. And operations at small scale in India need automation early, not late. Shut it down when it became clear that fixing the unit economics required capital I didn't have and wasn't willing to raise for a business with this much operational drag.